No BioShock Infinite This Year, Not For You

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Let’s do this, okay: When a new game first announces a release date, let’s just go ahead and ignore it. Wasn’t it Einstein who said the very definition of insanity was filling a balloon with kittens and then severing off your own leg? So it is that BioShock: Infinite has declared it won’t be with us this year at all. They’re now looking at February next year.

Despite still being over five months away, Levine has said that it wasn’t enough time to make the “specific tweaks and improvements” the game needs. The new date is set as the 26th February 2013, which is, by my estimation, ages away. Especially since I confidently predict another delay will be announced on January 14th to say it will be out in May.

Levine, in a pretend-personalised mass-mail-out attempts to garner empathy by pointing out they delayed the original BioShock for the same reasons,

“I won’t kid you: BioShock Infinite is a very big game, and we’re doing things that no one has ever done in a first-person shooter. We had a similar experience with the original BioShock, which was delayed several months as our original ship date drew near. Why? Because the Big Daddies weren’t the Big Daddies you’ve since come to know and love. Because Andrew Ryan’s golf club didn’t have exactly the right swing. Because Rapture needed one more coat of grimy Art Deco. The same principle now applies to BioShock Infinite.”

It also means it won’t be showing at E3 and GamesCom, which is surprising since they’ve shown off plenty of content previously. But Levine explains preparing for those takes time away from development. Something a lot of developers will sympathise with, and then punch someone when they realise their publisher wouldn’t let them get away with that excuse. It also means there’s no big show that will reveal anything new before the release date.

Forever is merely infinite in the context of time. They’re the same thing.

You can’t say infinite is static, because of cardinality. The set of infinite real numbers is far larger than the set of infinite integers, even though they’re both infinite, because for every single integer in the infinite integers set, there are infinite real numbers between that integer and the next one in the sequence. The set of infinite real numbers can be considered an infinite 2D plane vs the 1D line that is the sequence of infinite integers.

It’s not necessarily that there are real numbers between all the integers and thus ‘more of them’ that makes the cardinality of the reals bigger than that of integers, it’s that they are uncountable. For example, the set of all even natural numbers and the set of all natural numbers have the same cardinality, even though you’d think, well for every number in the even set there’s a corresponding one in the set of all natural numbers, but then there’s ALSO an odd number between that, so twice as many.

They are, however, the same ‘size’ because for each there is a process you can do wherein, theoretically, if it were repeated infinitely you’d ‘count’ all of them. E.g. for the natural numbers start at 1, add 1 to that, then add 1 to the result of that, repeat forever. For the evens, start at 2, add 2, and so on.

The reals however, do not have a process like this. There’s no procedure you can do to count ‘all’ of the real numbers; you can always go back and find one you ‘missed.’

The only thing I really remember about the proof for that one is that it’s diagonal, and that you can write it on a napkin, which my prof was always super proud about boasting that she had done on more than one occasion, so I’ll just let wikipedia handle it from here on out: link to en.wikipedia.org

/completely superfluous math lesson that had no puns in it at all, sorry :(

You can’t really answer this question though, since they’re different measurements. “forever” is a measurement of time, whereas “infinite” is a measurement of anything that can have more than one. I suppose you could use it to say an infinite number of days, or such, but in the end it’s too broad a spectrum to be compared in such a way.

I’ll ignore first announcements of release dates when the press stops letting us know about it.

As for the game itself, I generally see delays as a good thing. Well, at least a better thing than launching as promised only to be confronted with a subpar game hat could have been much better or that will only be after the 27th patch.

So… yeah. Just delay the damn thing as long as you give us a good game. There’s plenty of other stuff to play around while I wait.

I don’t know if Shigeru Miyamoto’s quote still holds much weight nowadays, considering the rise of DLC (both paid and free) basically means a game that’s released today can feel completely different a year later.

If Ken would just shut the fuck up about other peoples game and concentrate on his own, we wouldn’t be having this discussion!

In all seriousness though, while the game looks interesting enough, it being pushed back a few months doesn’t do much for me. I wasn’t looking that forward to this game, myself. And if that will make the difference in the end product, I’m for it. Releasing during the holiday season pretty much guarantees I wouldn’t buy this one before it was nice and cheap on Steam. Maybe I will now, we’ll see.

Yes, I hear it’s been implemented in Max Payne 3. It’s replacing bullet-time; it alt-tabs you out of the game and loads GTA5 for about twenty minutes, which you don’t really enjoy because you want to play Max Payne.

Not looking forward to it anyway this confirms to me the game is a scripted mess like most of the media released so far shows & sorry but Ken Levine is overrated anyway!!!

Bioshock1 was ok due to ahead of its time DX10 water FX & atmosphere but the story was horrible & gameplay very poor. Bioshock2 was horrible & should have been Bioshock1 DLC. 2K games are not exactly a PC friendly publisher either & love their OTT DRM so my expectations are set low regardless of release date…….

Go back & look at the gameplay video media released in the last year & tell me where does it indicate its not pre-scripted. Its not hard to tell just look at the sequences shown nearly all are using scripts its obvious they are QTE’s or something similar. as the movement is too precise for human control.

If 2K were confident in this game they would not delay it to the Feb graveyard spot (which The Darkness2 held & sank on this year!). Feb is the new publisher dumping ground for games which do not have enough potential to sell with intense competition. The original release date was around Resident Evil6 & Black Ops2 both games will outsell this many times over so 2K push it back as they know it needs more work (de-scripting or more than likely a major rethink would not be surprised if Ken Levine walks either this is taking far too long considering how limited Bioshock1 was gameplay wise).

You don’t think the reason we get mostly scripted events as teasers is because they look better than regular gameplay? There was at most a couple of seconds of gameplay in the trailers for Bioshock, yet that game turned out pretty good.
Just a thought.

False comparison. We are not Irrational’s clients. 2k Games is their client, and as the publisher 2K sets the release date. Presumably they’ve seen and heard enough to understand that the delay is in everyone’s favour or they wouldn’t have agreed to it.

Nor did I see in this article that they would not be releasing any further media, advertising, interviews or such between now and release – only that they would not be attended E3. No great loss, in my opinion.

Maybe there is some truth to the rumours we’ll see GTA V this year after all. The main reason people we’re down on the idea of a Christmas release was that it would be running up against Bioshock infinite and it wouldn’t of made sense for 2K to have 2 horses in the race.

It’s all one big marketing ploy! Also I rly disliked the PC version of Bioshock 1. It’s the only game where I’ve had constant audio issues. So hey, an unspecified finger for you! I’m only being angry because LOVE.